In September, Simon Costanzo, Caroline Donovan, and I traveled to Edmonton, Alberta for a science communication course sponsored by the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI). Participants had a diverse range of backgrounds and expertise, including researchers, planners, GIS analysts, communicators, and managers.

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Similar to a good Halloween costume, you want any map you create to convey a clear and understandable message that it doesn’t take long for the viewer to digest. Someone viewing your map should not need to take more than a minute or two to understand it’s purpose. Also similar to a Halloween costume, the big winners in map creation pay very close attention to detail. Halloween Google Maps costume. Credit:

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The Basin Report Card Initiative, a partnership between the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the World Wildlife Fund, worked closely with game developers from the Engagement Lab at Emerson College to produce a fun, interactive and thought provoking game, “Get the Grade!” . “Get the Grade” was successfully launched at three signature events across the globe:

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The 19th annual River Symposium was held in Delhi, India this year - the first time it's been held outside of Australia. I had a chance to attend, and to present a couple of talks related to the partnership we have with WWF for the Basin Report Cards Initiative. The highlight for me was the special session we co-hosted with WWF to demonstrate the Report Card Game on Wednesday afternoon to close out the meeting. We had about 30 participants, and it was a lively and boisterous session.

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Last month, while on vacation in Italy, I had the opportunity to visit the aptly nicknamed “floating city”, Venice. For thousands of years, life in Venice has centered around water, reliant on the sea, lagoon and canals for protection, transportation, and livelihoods, and today those waters threaten to engulf the city. During a walking tour of Venice, we were able to venture off the beaten path, and learn a bit more about the engineering, and problems facing this magnificent city.

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Future Card: a report card that forecasts future ecosystem health grades based on alternate management strategies. The holy grail right? Well hopefully. This idea of a “future card” began 18 months ago while I was attending a meeting held by the Luc Hoffman Institute in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for the LIVES’s project (Linked Indicators for Vital Ecosystem Services).

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On Wednesday, August 24th a group of technical experts, stakeholders and communicators met at the Chesapeake Bay Program in an attempt to make some sense of the current knowledge about the influence of the Susquehanna River reservoir system on Chesapeake Bay water quality. The group that gathered in Eastport on this temperate August day was a diverse one, although almost everyone in the room had been involved with Susquehanna River management and/or research for a number of years.

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In Early August, Jane Hawkey and I traveled to Mérida and Sisal, to help initiate an ecosystem health report card for the Yucatán State coast of Mexico.

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I had the great opportunity to represent IAN and UMCES as the institutional representative to the Future Earth's Coasts Scientific Steering Committee meeting in Taipei, Taiwan last week. Hosted by JC Lin at the National Taiwan University, the meeting brought together 15 representatives from all over the world to discuss the scientific direction of the group for the next five years.

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Does Rachel Carson still have something to teach us about communicating science to the public? Silent Spring , Carson’s 1962 best-seller on the environmental perils of herbicides and pesticides, launched the movement that created the Environmental Protection Agency. But, the communications field has changed a lot in the last 50 years. The era of television came and went, and television’s replacement, the internet, is revolutionizing the industries of music, film, and journalism.

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